“Then I’ll have no love!” cried Lalette, looking up furiously, tear-drops sparkling on her lashes. “I’ll hate and hate and hate.” A tiny red spot appeared on each of Dame Domijaiek’s cheeks. “I do not think you had better say that again in this house,” she said. “I have an arrangement to make, and will return before evening. Tell Laduis.” She went out, leaving a Lalette who could hardly bear herself, nor find anything to do, in her mind going over and over the dreadful ground of Rodvard’s treachery and the fact that he was one of the Sons of the New Day. Even if he came to her now, she would not have him, that book was closed by his own hand; and the boy Laduis coming in, she allowed him to draw her out of her megrims, so that when the widow returned, they were almost gay together. But it was almost dawn before sleep touched her. II She came awake with a start, and the sense that something dreadful had happened. It must be late morning; the widow was gone from the other side of the bed and Laduis’ cot was empty and neatly made up. There was— All at once the whirl at the back of her mind resolved itself into a pattern. There were two things in it, a picture of a strange room where men talked before a fire while a sea beat on a rocky shore, and running through it as though the picture were transparent, an appeal so naked and desperate that it brought her to her feet at once—mind speaking to mind without words to say that the holder of her Blue Star was lying bewitched and near death. There was no wine; it was horribly hard to trace out the pattern of the counter-witchery in water, even with the help of some dust from the corner, and the effort of the projection left her so weak and shaken that when it was done she collapsed across the bed in the shift that had served her as a night-dress and did not even hear Dame Domijaiek come in. “So you have done it,” said her voice (and Lalette thought that she had never in her life heard anything so cold). Lalette raised her head. The older woman was looking at the patterns which still moved faintly, not at her at all. “I ask your pardon,” she said. “It was an emergency; I learned—” “Nothing you can say will change the fact that you have brought witchery into my house.” Lalette struggled to her feet. “Well, I will go.” “Yes,” said the mask-maker, “I think you must go. You have brought on me and my son even worse dangers than you dream of. You must go. When you spoke of hating yesterday, I thought it might come to that, but I foolishly let sympathy overrule my judgment.” In the room above them, Mme. Kaja struck a chord on her music, and after one false beginning, launched into the bride’s aria from “The Disinherited.” Lalette looked at the floor and there were tears in her eyes. The widow spoke again: